Using People with Mental Illness as Clickbait Hurts Us

Bad articles on the problems we face can hurt and kill people. Write better.

Dear everyone, including myself: We deserve to be alive. We have the right to self-directed services and whatever works best for us. We deserve to be alive. Stay alive. Stay alive.

I have been on medication for a long time, first for ADHD, then anxiety, then depression. I have intermittently had periods of wanting to die since age 14. My most recent full-blown crisis landed me in the hospital. It was not a question for my friends whether they still wanted me alive, even as I lay bare every problem and feeling I was having. They wanted me alive.

Dear everyone, including myself: We deserve to be alive. We have the right to self-directed services and whatever works best for us. We deserve to be alive. Stay alive. Stay alive.

A study in the British Journal of Psychiatry stated 

Evidence suggests that there is an increase in suicides following media reports of suicide, which is frequently referred to as copycat behaviour or as the Werther effect… The risk is thought to depend not only on reader characteristics,2,3 but also on media content. 3–5 

While the author of a certain xoJane article did not report the person’s death as a suicide, she left open the implication with a “supposedly” and the method of “supposed” death. She wrote an article that openly told us what we should do and tried to tell us how much she thought our lives were worth. It was a grim reminder of some people’s mindsets, but we do not have to bow to her desires.

With that knowledge, writers, know you are writing about people who deserved to be alive, and your audience are people who deserve to be alive, and your audience includes people who may already be prone to suicidal ideation. You are responsible for encouraging us to die if you write a sensationalized drama with explicit details. That is not a thing to take lightly or relish. It is a thing to make you hold yourselves accountable in your writing.

Dear everyone, including myself: We deserve to be alive. We have the right to self-directed services and whatever works best for us. We deserve to be alive. Stay alive. Stay alive.

What do we do instead? What do I do instead? My friend wrote on how to talk about suicide, and about taking care of ourselves and each other in advocacy-based communities, which see a lot of burnout and stress. We should demand that people write more responsibly, as per what my friend gathered information on. We should take care of each other when they don’t. I will try to stop writing so much about things when I’m off work. We should set healthy boundaries for each other but still show support.  

And writers should stop writing sensationalized dramas about mental illness, regardless of whether it’s about suicide. Writers of all kinds, this applies to you. These are our stories and our lives, and we want them respected by all, not showcased as some kind warning story, some kind of pity-narrative, some kind of revenge-story, some kind of sensationalized odd horror feature story. You can hurt people. Take some accountability. 

Dear everyone, including myself: We deserve to be alive. We have the right to self-directed services and whatever works best for us. We deserve to be alive. Stay alive. Stay alive.

People with Mental Illness Deserve to be Alive

Originally published on Medium

XoJane recently published an article about someone with schizoaffective disorder’s death being a blessing. Outrage ensued. The author’s name became anonymous. The editors of xoJane, at least temporarily, locked their Twitter profiles, then released this apology:

Screencap of: “I apologize for an article that was posted here yesterday, entitled “My Former Friend’s Death Was a Blessing.” I deeply regret the hurt that this article has caused and understand that it has perpetuated stigma and diminished the lives of people with mental illness. I am committed to immediately reviewing our vetting process to ensure that this experience has a positive influence on the ways in which we at xoJane present all women going forward. I appreciate all of you who took the time to let us know how you felt about this issue.”

I will not link to the archived version of the article right now. I would like to focus on what happens when you write about these topics like that. When you write that it’s better that people with mental health needs — especially people with particularly shunned diagnoses — die, this is what I know about you: I do not trust you with anyone. And I do not trust anyone who would post such a thing. I do not know the motivation of an editor allowing it to be posted. There are a multitude of reasons people have suggested, most of them related to increasing page hits and profit. A lot of people already think our lives have no value. They will continue to visit the page. Or, people outside the disability rights/mental health communities will not hear about it.

What happens when you write this way is a lot. It first of all tells people with mental illness — and again especially those with more shunned diagnoses — that people think we’re better off dead. It confirms some of our worst fears, our darkest, deepest worries. I do not think there is any data on this, but I suspect this way of writing about us encourages people to kill themselves.

It also presumes to know what the person with mental illness would have wanted. It presumes that we always think of ourselves as shells, better off dead, and that our suffering will always outweigh our right and desire to live. And indeed, some of us do feel that we are suffering a lot, and/or have suicidal ideation. I spent time in a hospital this January to prevent a suicide attempt! But writing that you know they’d be happy with the way they died and that being dead is better for them perpetuates in a very active way negative self-value and more fear and more, “Well, no one will miss me if I die.”

Then, it reinforces the narrative to other people, casual readers, that we are miserable, soulless unpeople. That with how uncomfortable we make people, we ought to be dead. Like I’ve mentioned in other pieces, we are at best inconvenient and uncomfortable to people. People are allowed to be uncomfortable with actions and statements, and assert boundaries — I have said awkward things to people in episodes of my cyclical mental illness and done my share of sometimes screwing up — but to capitalize off it and further the idea that we’re inherently bad and wrong and unpeople is unethical.

How #MHM2016 Misses the Mark

 There seems to be an assumption behind many mental health campaigns, like the #MHM2016 one – for Mental Health Month – that mental health care is all people with mental illness need. There is an unwavering focus on access to care. Okay. That's great for people who want mental health care. I mean, I see a psychiatrist and a therapist. I take medication. Cool. In some ways I am a model citizen with mental illness. But when people talk about access to “treatment,” and people “needing treatment,” and “the plight of the mentally ill” and “mental health awareness,” this is what people mean, I think:

1. Access to to treatment is more important than issues like stable housing, co-occurring physical health conditions that can be managed so we don't die at our average age of fifty-two, and a source of income.
2. People need access and should have treatment whether they want it or not, because they need it for their own good.
3. Access to treatment will fix all the problems and manage the mental health needs well.
4. People with mental illness belong in the hands of psychiatrists and doctors.
5. Coercive/involuntary treatment and/or hospitalization.
6. Awareness!!! The tragedy of mental illness!!!

My reactions to these:

1. Stable housing, is, you know, kind of necessary to begin thinking about treatment. Instead of being homeless, or bouncing from place to place, and worrying about all the things that come with that.
2. Stop. The baseline for any treatment should be self-directed.
3. See number one. We need community supports, adequate physical health care, stable housing.
4. How medical model of you. We can be fixed just by doctors, clearly! Tell that to my brain after a psych ward visit, and years of psychiatry and therapy.
5. See number two.
6. We are not broken - at least, not that you can decide. We are not tragedies. Many of us would take magic cures. Many of us wouldn't. More than that, mental health awareness campaigns are aimed at getting us into treatment where we “belong.” We become whatever our diagnosis is, to be fixed. Alternately, we are prone to being mass shooters in the public eye. When your campaigns focus on treatment, it makes us seem broken and people are likely to believe we need treatment before ending up mass shooters.